Monday, September 5, 2005

We have a massively parallel volunteer effort going on. Step one was to design a data standard, the PeopleFinder Interchange Format (PFIF). Step two was to start up a volunteer effort to enter data in. Step three was to implement the PFIF for data entry of message boards, hence our move from www.neworleansnetwork.org to new servers. Step four is to enter all the data that is in databases on the web. Step five is to make it all searchable.

We are doing steps 4 and 5 right now. A wide variety of volunteers and companies are creating software to bring the existing databases into ours. We actually would prefer them all to implement PFIF so that we can just parse their feed and they only minimally change their site.

The search interface is being lead by Salesforce.com. The status of that project is publically viewable on the project wiki.

We're for real folks. Nothing nefarious going on.... just a lot of tired people on a holiday weekend away from their families for a good cause. Thanks to all of our volunteers. This wouldn't work without you.